Zombie Art

When the Hudson surged through Chelsea, in late October, at least forty million dollars’ worth of art was destroyed or damaged beyond repair: rendered a total loss, in insurance-company parlance. Such works—those for which the cost of conservation and the subsequent loss in market value are greater than the amount for which the works are insured—will enter into a strange netherworld. Removed from the marketplace, these objects will live on in warehouses, unseen and unappreciated, becoming what has been called “dead art” or “zombie art.”

A group of works that were damaged before Sandy are the subject of an exhibition, “No Longer Art,” which has been on display at Columbia University. The show was put together by Elka Krajewska, a Polish artist based in New York, and Mark Wasiuta, who teaches architecture at Columbia. Krajewska explained her motivation for conducting a postmortem during a panel discussion at the opening. “I assumed that when a work is destroyed it somehow disappears physically,” she told a crowd crammed into the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery. “But when I learned that, actually, there are inventories in storage of work that for me, as an artist, would seem not to exist, that interested me and moved me, and I felt a responsibility to deal with this material.”

The deceased works were not hanging on the walls—Krajewska did not want to aestheticize their demise—but were mounted on dollies that were placed in an alcove and could be pulled out individually, like refrigerated drawers in a morgue. Among them was a Jeff Koons porcelain balloon dog that had fallen off a shelf and shattered, its severed head still in a brown padded envelope that was marked with the word “broken.” There was a Linda Bond graphite-and-gunpowder drawing of kaffiyehs that, while on display in a museum, had been smeared by the hand of a small boy. There were two perfect parts of a triptych painted by Helmut Dorner: the third part had been lost in transit. On shelves were catalogues containing correspondence by the insurance company leading up to the declaration of total loss. The names of the art works’ owners had been redacted, but not the manner in which the works had been damaged. These ranged from “Something incredibly heavy, or a conveyor belt had to have done something like this” to “The box looked like it was used as an accordion.”

All the works were donated or loaned by the German-based Axa Art Insurance Corporation to the Salvage Art Institute, which was founded by Krajewska in 2010 to be, as a wall text put it, “a refuge for salvaged work while offering a platform for confronting the regulation of its financial, aesthetic and social value.” (Krajewska prefers the term “salvage art” to “dead art.”) Christiane Fischer, the president and C.E.O. of Axa Art, was a participant in the panel discussion. “Ultimately, value is a market force,” she said. But, Fischer went on, just because works were financially worthless did not mean they were without value, or might not one day have a market value restored to them. “Just imagine all the damaged works from Roman times and Greek times,” she said. “If they would have been thrown out, how empty would the Met be?”

After the discussion, gallerygoers circulated among the art works. One viewer thumbed through photographs of rock stars by Jim Marshall that had been damaged in transit, as if he were riffling through vinyl records at a yard sale. Another peered at a painting by the Cuban artist Miguel Florido, which had a violent slash in its center. The viewer leaned in close, as one might do to examine an artist’s brushwork, although in this case it was the handiwork of what seemed to be an overenthusiastic art handler unpacking the painting. “The knife was too long,” Christian Scheidemann, a conservator who appeared on the panel, explained.

Scheidemann’s conservation studio, which is far enough uptown to have been spared by Sandy, is now filled with possible future accessions for the Salvage Art Institute. He is working to revive what he can, while urging collectors to stay away from the operating room. “These images of post-flood stay in your mind, and, even if the work afterwards is in total perfect condition, you have this memory of ‘Oh, it must have been in the water somewhere,’ ” he said. “So we just tell art lovers the damage is minor, and they should probably not come to see it.” ♦